It’s been quite a year. The last few months especially have been particularly heavy for just about everyone. Amid the intensity of it all, my team and I on the Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast produced another two seasons — in our new, newsier format.
Individually, each episode stands as an intimate exploration of some of the most pressing issues of our time. Collectively, our back catalogue serves as a library of critical conversations around systemic racism that can be revisited as similar issues continue to unfold in the world.
Each week, we also worked towards creating a new type of newsroom culture — one that centres the need for compassion internally, but also one that asks both journalist and listener: what can we do to help make change?
This season has been our most successful yet. With the number of downloads we now get, we are among the world’s top five per cent of podcasts and we even made it to Apple Podcasts’ chart for top News Commentary in Canada.
And we covered a wide range of topics. We looked at how right-wing nationalist values are growing among Black and brown candidates in the Republican party as well as school-aged boys in Canada. We also tackled pressing socio-economic issues, like the erosion of affordable housing, and our crisis of food insecurity. We spoke to Indigenous scholars about the ongoing search for the unmarked graves of children lost to Indian Residential Schools, as well as the headline-making exposé questioning the Indigenous roots of music legend Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Our most listened-to episodes, those replayed and used to help communities delve into challenging conversations, were those in which we attempted to add meaningful perspectives to the ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel. We spoke to two scholars with both expertise and personal ties to the region to understand why the conflict is so hard to talk about. We also sought to understand the long history of Palestinian ties to the land.
Our efforts, of course, would have been impossible without the brilliant scholars and guests who joined us each week — not to mention our listeners, who have now been with us through more than 50 episodes!
As we head into the New Year, we are sharing our Don’t Call Me Resilient playlist. It’s a collection of songs on the theme of resilience, reflection and revolution, inspired by the topics we cover and co-created by our production team and podcast guests from this season and beyond.
Collectively, these are songs that help get us through tough moments, and light us up when we’re depleted. We hope you’ll enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed putting it together; and we hope it might bring you some strength and solidarity, or maybe even a little joy as we head into 2024.